Around The Net

Emails containing gift guides rose in popularity in 2012. A study by Experian Marketing Services found that using the word "Best" in the subject line of gift guides had a significant impact on performance, lifting open rates by 8 percentage points and clicks by 2 points. ...Read the whole story

Many of the latest firewall, spam filter and VPN appliances sold by Barracuda Networks contain undocumented backdoor accounts, the company disclosed today. While the backdoor accounts are apparently set up so that they would only be accessible from Internet addresses assigned to Barracuda, they are in fact accessible to potentially hundreds of other companies and network owners. A security researcher at SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab found the backdoors, along with evidence that they may have existed since 2003. ...Read the whole story

A new survey of media and marketing executives by AdMedia Partners identifies Mobile as the most disruptive media and marketing trend, ganering a vote from 25% of respondents. Social Media was next at 13%. 12% of respondents still see Digital as the most disruptive trend in media and marketing. Mobile was also identified in the survey as the top area of interest for M&A expansion for 2013. ...Read the whole story

Twitter has recently begun sending emails to members alerting them to some new followers of note, and also when people deemed of interest have shared content on the service. While the special followers' commonality may be a large following of their own, the targeting instead appears to be based on mutual interests. Twitter Co-founder Ev Williams downplays follower size as a meaningful metric, saying what is a better gauge of shared interest is retweets. ...Read the whole story

A study of over 3.5 million leads from over 400 companies has found that text messages can lift conversion rates by 113% relative to average conversion of leads, but only when it is used as the only follow-up channel after the initial lead. Texting used before and after the initlal contact can lift conversion by 20%, but texting only before another means of contact depresses conversion rate by 5%. The study was conducted by Leads360. ...Read the whole story

Don Tapscott, author, strategist and University of Toronto professor, believes that companies must move past email for knowledge management and into a collaborative suite of social product, because email containerizes knowledge instead of opening it to collaboration. "E-mail is sort of like what Mark Twain said about the weather," Tapscott remarked. "Everybody’s talking about it, and nobody’s doing anything about it. We have to get rid of e-mail." ...Read the whole story

Google often comes under fire for its privacy practices, but the company also has at least one policy that's surprisingly privacy-friendly. This week, Google revealed that it doesn't disclose email messages to law enforcement authorities unless ...More

According to the Experian Marketing Services market survey addressing email acquisition and engagement tactics, 44% of total opens occur on mobile devices; 52% of marketers have used animated gifs in their email campaigns; marketers are seeing ...More

I have been working to encourage more email marketers to integrate email and social for at least five years (and writing about it since 2009). Where are we now in 2013? The results are all over ...More